October 26, 2017 by Robert Franklin, Esq, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization
I’ve written a fair amount about the horrible conditions that exist for fathers and their children in Israeli family courts. There, the Tender Years Doctrine reigns and, even after a child passes its sixth birthday, fathers encounter all but insurmountable obstacles to having meaningful time with their kids. Israeli advocates for reform of family courts consistently find themselves stonewalled by feminists in the Knesset who oppose anything that would even marginally improve the lot of fathers and children. Indeed, just last week I posted a piece on a Knesset hearing on family courts to which no fathers’ rights organizations were invited by the feminist chair of the committee.
So I suppose it comes as no surprise that another feminist MK, Merav Michaeli, declared traditional families to be “the least safe place for children.” This article by Carolina Landsmann takes down Michaeli and her patently untrue claims effectively enough, but even so treats her far too kindly (Haaretz, 10/19/17).
“This is not funny,” said MK Merav Michaeli on an Australian TV panel last month, before going on to say: “The core family as we know it, unfortunately, is the least safe place for children.”…
“The data” is what led Michaeli to her conclusions. These are “the data [that] speak about every fifth child that goes to some kind of abuse – sexual, physical, emotional.” One should have seen the astonished faces of the other panel members upon hearing her words. Every normal parent in the world who has not caught the semantic disease afflicting Michaeli and her ilk understands that the “data” she possesses is not worth the paper it’s written on, regardless of its scientific validity.
Hmm. I’m not sure what that last clause means. After all, if something has scientific validity, it’s worth a great deal.
But of course Michaeli’s statement likely has no validity at all. I have no access to the data out of Israel on children’s safety and their familial arrangements, but throughout the English-speaking world, children are far safer with two biological parents than in any other situation. Step parent families, adoptive families and certainly foster families are far and away more dangerous to children than are traditional ones. Indeed, Michaeli’s claim used to be raised in the United States but was so obviously false that it became that rarest of birds a false claim that feminists no longer assert.
Meanwhile Landsmann’s sarcasm about Michaeli’s claims could take the paint off a battleship. But Michaeli’s clear as a bell about what she thinks of the family and what must be done with it. Hers comes straight from the radical feminist playbook and is as nutty and ill-informed as it gets.
First, she wants to destroy the family. Why? Because it was instituted by men to perpetuate the subordination of women. Gee, where to begin? No, the family originated to serve the ends of both sexes. For men, monogamous marriage was an effort to ensure that they could identify children as their own (or not). That was important post-agriculture because property had become important and men wanted their offspring to have what they’d accrued during their lives.
For women, marriage was an effort to secure to themselves their husband’s assets and financial well-being. After all, if a woman weren’t married to a man and he had no idea whether the children she bore were his or not, what would have been the purpose of his using his wealth/power/influence/connections for her benefit?
So, needless to say, the gender feminist position that the traditional family is the seat of men’s oppression of women is entirely without merit. Married women have been, since the institution’s invention, healthier, safer and happier than their unmarried counterparts. Children have been healthier, safer and happier. Only feminists like Michaeli could manage to convince themselves that that constituted oppression.
Having destroyed the nuclear family,
And what about children? “The person who takes responsibility for the child – and someone must take responsibility for the child – needs to be obligated for certain criteria that the state should actually decide on.” The state? “No! What do you mean the state? It’s us coming together in a democracy, we all decide what it means to be a good parent,” explained Michaeli.
Yes, I can see it now, this “coming together” to “decide what it means to be a good parent.” My guess is that Michaeli has in mind for gender feminists like herself to play the leading role in such a “coming together.” I guess she believes that radical feminism has been quite the uniting force these past 40 or 50 years. The rest of us know otherwise – that there has been no more divisive force in any Western society for all that time and longer. Just look at Michaeli herself who carries on the radical feminist tradition of vitriolic hatred of men.
Landsmann, to her credit, takes the lash to all of Michael’s bigoted absurdities.
But keep in mind that this is an elected member of Israel’s legislative body. She’s not some bag lady wandering the streets muttering. She has an effect on law and public policy. Don’t believe me? Ask Israeli father’s right groups.
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